"Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish? Nothing else"
About this Quote
Freedom, for Epictetus, isn’t a flag to wave or a permission slip from the state. It’s a stark diagnostic: if you can’t live as you wish, you’re not free, full stop. The punch of the line is its refusal to romanticize liberty. He compresses a whole Stoic ethics course into a blunt, almost prosecutorial definition that forces the reader to ask an uncomfortable question: who, exactly, is stopping you?
The subtext is the classic Stoic reversal. “As we wish” doesn’t mean indulging every appetite; it means aligning your will with what you can actually govern. Epictetus, born enslaved and later freed, knew that legal status and inner sovereignty don’t always match. A person can be politically free and psychologically owned by status anxiety, craving, or fear; another can be constrained by circumstance yet unbroken in judgment. The quote is doing that sly Stoic move of relocating the battleground from institutions to the self, not to excuse tyranny, but to deny it the last word.
Context matters: he’s writing in an empire where most people had little say over their external conditions. Stoicism offered a portable kind of dignity: control what’s yours (your judgments, choices, character), treat everything else as weather. The line works because it sounds like a slogan for autonomy, then tightens into a demand for discipline. If your “wish” is trained and coherent, freedom becomes durable; if it’s scattered and compulsive, liberty turns into another cage you carry around.
The subtext is the classic Stoic reversal. “As we wish” doesn’t mean indulging every appetite; it means aligning your will with what you can actually govern. Epictetus, born enslaved and later freed, knew that legal status and inner sovereignty don’t always match. A person can be politically free and psychologically owned by status anxiety, craving, or fear; another can be constrained by circumstance yet unbroken in judgment. The quote is doing that sly Stoic move of relocating the battleground from institutions to the self, not to excuse tyranny, but to deny it the last word.
Context matters: he’s writing in an empire where most people had little say over their external conditions. Stoicism offered a portable kind of dignity: control what’s yours (your judgments, choices, character), treat everything else as weather. The line works because it sounds like a slogan for autonomy, then tightens into a demand for discipline. If your “wish” is trained and coherent, freedom becomes durable; if it’s scattered and compulsive, liberty turns into another cage you carry around.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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